may 17 2024
i finished "her tale of shim chong" in two days, which is a super fast pace for me reading 89 chapters of a webtoon! it's practically rewired my brain and i haven't been able to stop thinking about it. chong and madame jang are so cute! i'm pretty predictable in the character relationship dynamics i like. i'm soo happy i found another webcomic with a masc lesbian protagonist! sometimes she will say the deepest lines and other times you'll be reminded that chong is a fifteen year old girl. she is so silly :) the art is gorgeous and i like the historical setting, which is a fictional "yuri kingdom" with influences from tang dynasty china and joseon dynasty korea, among others. there are quite a lot of depictions of misogyny, and they really got to me, especially when madame jang realized she would only be remembered as a wife and mother and chong says she'd remember madame jang as herself.
her tale of shim chong was so good that it got me thinking that i should make a historical fantasy au for signalis! i originally thought about taking heavy influence from the joseon period, but i thought that the civil war between the eusan empire and nation is important for contextualizing signalis' themes about individuality and death. so, i think the goguryeo-tang war or tang-silla war periods would fit the best. so, it would be like empire = goguryeo, nation = silla and tang, leng = a region in the far north of manchuria, heimat = seorabeol/gyeongju, buyan = pyongyang, and rotfront would be equivalent to a silla city.
i need to start researching three kingdoms period clothing since i don't know much about it. the setting would be fantasy due to it being matriarchal (as implied in signalis canon) and also the plotpoint of ariane transforming into a dragon as a metaphor for her radiation sickness. when i considered what bioresonance's equivalent would be, i decided to go with shamanism since it quite literally deals in "the song of the gods."
imagining kolibri as a mudang is pretty interesting! ariane would exhibit some symptoms of spirit sickness but never be identified as a person capable of being a mudang. i'm still thinking about how i should incorporate the replikas into the world. maybe each type of replika represents a different clan?
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